Demystifying the Exhibitor Experience

The following passage is from TSJ Member Sana to give you an overview of what it means to exhibit at the Curriculum Fair. Please sign up at: http://bit.ly/tsjexhibitor

This is a short account of my experience exhibiting at the TSJ
Curriculum Fair.

Last year was my first year exhibiting, and like many, I was very
apprehensive at first. However, with the encouragement of my
dear friend, Jonah, active member of TSJ, I worked up the courage.
Still a little worried about how I could possibly contribute to the
fair, I enlisted the help of my co-teacher Mary. We brainstormed
how we could or already had incorporated social justice ideals such as
anti-racist, multilingual, student-centered, etc. education in the
classroom. We realized we were implementing social justice
principles while teaching the novel, Monster by Walter Dean
Myers through our discussions of the injustices youth of color,
specifically African Americans, face with the judicial system.

We looked at the TSJ exhibitor application, which mentioned that
most exhibitors put up science-fair-like boards to exhibit their work.
The board didn't take that long to put together, but to ground it in
the TSJ principles, I am going to have my students put the board
together this year.

The next step was to make copies of the worksheets we distributed
to students. Also, we put student responses on our boards to help
their voices be heard. We were finally ready and excited to exhibit at
the fair. The day of the fair we arrived around 9 a.m. and put up our
board and copies, which took a whole 5 minutes. During the fair we
were at our exhibit, but we weren't chained down to the exhibit, so we
were able to enjoy the curriculum fair as well.

I hope you end up exhibiting because although you may think you
have nothing to offer, the very fact that you are reading this shows
your heart is in the right place and have things to share!

--Sana JafriFore more info about this year's fair and to sign up to be an exhibitor, click here.